


Vaster Than Empires and More Slow

by Atropos_lee



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-10-13
Updated: 2004-10-13
Packaged: 2017-12-05 05:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/719325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atropos_lee/pseuds/Atropos_lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little fragment I wrote in 2004, imagining a possible future for Hogwarts, its next headmaster, and the Boy Who Lived.<br/>Hogwarts is definitely a character in this...</p><p>
(Acknowledgement: The style of this piece  was strongly influenced by the early work of Patricia McKillip)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vaster Than Empires and More Slow

The last day before the first day. The last day of silence before children fill the halls, rooms and corridors beneath him. Only the soughing wind, and the heavy crackle and snap of the banners in the blue air. White banners, still at half-mast, nine months after. Hogwarts lies below, quiet and expectant, bone white, coral pink in the hazy sunlight, her shell-like towers impossibly fragile against the sky, her many feet cooling in the lake.

He can feel the warm stone beneath his hands stretching outwards, upwards to create new cells and struts and chambers to be filled, year on year. A new buttress spilling out to the east, a pier inching upwards in the tower to the north, a tendril of foundation work thrusting its way deep into rock hundreds of feet below him. 

Perhaps he is witness to the first stirring of a new wing, the first concretion of a century of growth. Perhaps he will live to see it roofed and colonized; it seems he is cursed, despite himself, to endure many, many, many generations more of the incomprehensibly idiotic young. 

He swings his legs over the warm white parapet, wondering if this awareness of the castle's slow genesis comes with the title of Headmaster, or is just another part of the strange new life he now suffers. Did Albus feel this, the Castle outgrowing him year after year? 

Three hundred feet below, through the swimming air beneath his shod feet, owls pivot over the forest canopy. 

_If I pushed away now, allowed myself to tread the air, would I fall or fly? Will the earth part like water, repulsed by my passing? Or break me apart? Perhaps neither. I might just have that one last instant of life to discover if I too can become stone with a thought._

_Flight from death - vol de la mort; I pledged myself to a man who twisted every fibre of his being to this end - and at the last, immortality is most inconsequential of the curses I'm left to deal with. I think I'm coping very well. In the circumstances._

White wings glisten among tan and black and gold; he reaches out tentatively but the owl's small fierce mind is full of mice and blood and moonlight, and he can find no reflection of the boy's face there, so he moves on, tentatively following a tendril of thought; to the mind of a squirrel, leaping from branch to branch in the green shadows, a litter of pine martin kittens mewed in the roots beneath, a mole burrowing blindly in the scented warmth under the lawns.

And then he is lost in a dizzying web of connections, life on life, world on world; on the edge of a vast steppe a woman calls from a lit doorway to her child; in Timbuktu an old man sighs in his sleep, and throws an arm over the body of his drowsy wife; in the sodium bright light of a Sydney street a women steps in front of a car, and her breath leaves her body in a white flash; he feels the thread of her life fray and untwist from the web.

Somewhere, in a field very very close, the wind stirs the grass as it plaits itself around splintered bone, shattered skulls and the pieces of a broken wand. 

But nowhere can Severus Snape find a trace of a boy with untidy hair and a scar. The earth is as ignorant of Potter now as it has been in the long months since the snow melted, and the dead were buried and the living started to understand how the their world had been changed.

The sun wheels. The shadow towers on the lawns beneath him draw a circle, west to east, before he turns his head and sees that he is watched by a hawk's furious eye in a boy's face.

Such a feral wind-whipped creature crouched beside him. Dirty feet drawn up tight to his body, arms wrapped about his calves, chin tucked close to his scabbed knees. Severus has the distinct impression that if he reached out to pet his visitor it would nip. Or fly away.

"You haven't moved in hours..." the boy's voice is hoarse, unused, like a door to an abandoned room.

_He'll never change now. He'll always be a boy. With thousand year old eyes. The only reason we did any of this was the slim chance that his generation might live long enough to grow up._

"I was looking for you."

"I was here." The boy's face is still blank, like a thrush's egg. "Say my name..."

"Harry."

The fire in the hawk's eye fades, and the boy relaxes, shifts a little closer on their shared perch. 

"I wasn't sure ... " he sighs. "I've been so many other things recently. I was a bird, I think, for the longest while."

Their forearms touch - that is enough for now.

"On a lake somewhere. Somewhere cold." He runs a tongue around his teeth, speculatively. "I think I ate salmon."

"An Osprey?" 

"Maybe. You don't think 'Osprey', you think 'wind' 'wings' 'fish'. This morning I smelled winter. I missed people. I missed you."

They sit, while the sun leaves them to cross the Atlantic ocean. 

Severus watches the green eyes lose focus, the wind-burnt face grow still. 

_He's looking into that elsewhere. Did I look like that when I was seeking him through the world?_

“Molly Weasley is planting bulbs. Draco Malfoy is shaving – he's meeting a girl ...” He is like a lost child in a dark street peering in at lit windows, pressing himself against the glass of ordinary lives. A broad smile - "Hermione is pregnant," a voice full of breathy wonder. "She doesn't know yet."

Still a nosy little brat then. "Then it would probably be - tactless to tell her." 

The boy sighs, and picks at a piece of loose stone near his feet. " Hmmm - I suppose you're right. I won't get the chance, anyway. She flinched last time she saw me – just after... When she had worked it out. She doesn't mean to, but... "

"Give her a decade or two, and she might get used to it. To you. And, difficult though it must be to break the habit, at least try not to pry into other people's secrets. It really doesn't help." 

Harry is tossing the stone idly, snatching out of the air, as another Harry once toyed with a broken snitch. Severus shudders, and is sharply pleased to discover that he hasn't outgrown the old reflexes, that he still owns his hard-won hatred, somewhere, like a curious bone in a locked cabinet, a flint-hard fossil in the foundation of himself. 

"Any tips, Professor - I mean, you have had so much more practise at terrifying people."

Severus snorts, "What possible advice can I give the Boy Who Knows Everything."

Harry shrinks. "I don't know everything - I don't know anything". The touch of his arm is gone, the cool air between them makes Severus's skin prickle with loss. 

"I imagine a millennium or two will be enough to learn a little more."

"You always said I needed to see more of the world."

"This is not quite what I had in mind - for either of us."

"No. I suppose not. I'm sorry."

"This has been unexpected - these... gifts." The word is distasteful on his tongue. "Give me time. I hardly expected to outlive my misspent youth. 'Dæmonic demi-god - consort of', is not what I had in mind as a career. And all because of something ludicrous I did when I was barely old enough to apparate! There should have been a law against it!" 

"There was."

Severus scratches at his forearm, and mutters, "I thought the dodgy tattoo was a bad enough idea... I had no idea what other jokes the universe had in store for me. Can you tell who the father is?"

"Now who's prying?" Harry sighs, "Probably, if I looked. But so could you, I suppose. "

"I don't think I want to find out exactly what we have in common."

"So - you haven't tried changing yet?" Severus is silent, still worrying at old wounds. There are limits to his endurance, his comfort. "We could try together - start with a snake... Or a crow.... Don't look at me like that! I was trying to think of something you'd feel comfortable becoming. Just to start. An owl. You like owls. If you just knew what it felt like – ." his voice trails off in longing, his eye darkens to the fierce gold of the hawk's glare.

Severus shivers. He has no desire to lose still more of himself. Not yet. "Perhaps. One day. After all, I have all the time I could possibly need."

But Harry is not listening. "Oh!" He has opened his hand and peers at the little scrap of stone. His eyes are wide with delight "It has shells in it!"

Severus takes it and holds it up to the light, squinting. "Ammonites. This is Oolitic Limestone. How apt." He slips back into teaching mode. Effortlessly. So much easier than imagining life as an owl. "This rock was once the ooze on an ocean floor, many millions of years before the first wizard crawled upright.” The whole castle is making itself out of the skeletons of a million million sea beasts. Shells, corals, sponges... a million million creatures, a million million years. 

Harry reaches a fingertip to trace the whorl. "I could spend years just learning to be a single shell like this... Perhaps I should live in the sea. I could be a whale. Or a shrimp. Or an - ammonite."

"Don't let me detain you.”

The boy snakes a thin arm around his waist, and Severus sighs. 

"Severus. Do you really think I will live for ever?"

"Of course not.. I bloody well hope not! Everything dies - even a mountain. Even stars. Even you."

"Us"

"But once again it looks as if the rules get to bend a little for the famous Harry Potter."

"All I wanted was not to be the Boy Who Lived. Not to be stared at, pointed out. Different. Just me."

"You're still an annoying, arrogant, strutting, infuriating, nosy brat."

"Thank you." Harry squeezes closer, warm, bony and smelling of clean cold air. "You are the unexpected gift. You weren't meant to be part of this at all. You always look at me, and see - just - me. Once in thousand years I'll rise out of the ocean and fly to you, and it will all be changed. The mountains change, the stars will change, and no one will know who I am, and what I did, or what we saw - except you."

There is a hollow place in his chest. The separation of the past nine months seemed long enough, until now. He wonders what it will feel like to become a sea snail or a hawk. It seems inevitable that he will have to find out, sooner or later. If only to pass time. If only not be alone. 

A trail of lights speckles the dark lake below. A dozen lanterns on a dozen little boats, full of a new generation of children. The castle's silence will soon be at an end. And he has a sorting to attend. A speech to make.

"What will you do now?"

"Dinner. I'm starving. Anything but Salmon. I can smell treacle tart." He jumps down from the parapet, and holds out his hard seeker's hand, dark with the scoured filth of his summer on the wind.

Severus replaces the little pebble carefully back on the empty ledge. The school, his school, may need to recycle it a century or two from now. Waste not, want not. 

Then he swings his feet back on to the sloping lead roof, and stands, carefully dusting down the skirts of his black coat. "Very well, Potter. And are you going to bother to get dressed first, or will you be content to scandalise my staff and confuse my first years?"

Harry looks down, startled, naked and innocent as a fish. He frowns a little at the puzzle of it all. After all, what are clothes to a creature who crossed the paths of the dead and unmakes the foundations of the earth?

"Maybe," he says, and takes Severus' hand in his.

Hand in hand Severus Snape and Harry Potter step down into the remade world. 

Hogwarts shifts imperceptibly - almost imperceptibly - to accommodate them.


End file.
